In reflecting upon personality it is perhaps best to begin with an idiosyncrasy I’ve felt since my youth and would like to suppose was widely shared by the generation of intellectuals to which I belong. The pen, the tongue itself, would hesitate before a word one would hardly wish to use except to ape it parodically. The aversion was directed toward a sphere of officialdom that was condensed in the concept of ‘personality.’ Personalities were people decked out with orders and ribbons, deputies of the type that was derided in a Munich song before the First World War. The word suggested putting on airs, being pretentious and self-important. Personalities were people who lived in anticipation of what would be said about them at their gravesides, and they fostered the impression of doing great things. They succeeded in transferring their external, social position onto their person, as if what a man had managed to do in the world justified him, as if success and the individual necessarily coincided harmoniously, although the former at once arouses suspicion about the latter. Karl Kraus exposed such atrocities in the practice of journalists who wrote that a public as such doesn’t exist, that it is nothing but an assembly of personalities.1 After all this, one would like to crawl under the table for shame when one hears of personality, for instance, of a personality in public life.
If there existed a philosophical history of words, then it would have a worthy object in the expression ‘personality’ and in the changes its meaning has undergone. It would hardly be a mistake to trace the rise of the word, which was simultaneously its decline, back to Kant. In the third chapter of the Critique of Practical Reason, which deals with the drives of pure practical reason, the question of personality is discussed with an emphasis the word has never since shaken off. According to Kant, personality is nothing other than “the freedom and independence from the mechanism of nature regarded as a capacity of a being subject to special laws, namely those pure practical laws given by its own reason, so that the person belonging to the world of sense is subject to his own personality so far as he belongs to the intelligible world; for it is then not to be wondered at that man, as belonging to both worlds, must regard his own being in relation to his second and higher vocation with reverence, and the laws of this vocation with the deepest respect.”2 Person and personality are not identical. Yet that respect and esteem personalities later arrogated to themselves was by no means intended for those people who are either really or supposedly prominent in the depraved sense of the term but for the general principle embodied in real existing persons. Kant faithfully respects the grammatical form of the word “personality.” The suffix “-ity” indicates an abstraction, an idea, not particular individuals.3
Yet, because this universality, moral freedom, indeed belongs to the intelligible, spiritual world and not to the sensible world of empirical individuals though manifesting itself only in them, this Kantian concept of personality declined with the rise of bourgeois individualism and attached itself to individual persons who, according to Kant’s own distinction, define themselves more by their price than by their dignity.4 Gradually the individual, in the interest of some arbitrary external and internal qualities, was to become directly what in Kant’s theory he was only indirectly by virtue of the principle of humanity within him. The honor accorded by Kant to the principle of humanity is smugly recuperated by the individual. Instead of having personality in Kant’s sense, one is a personality; instead of the intelligible character—the better potential in each person—the empirical person, just as he happens to be, is posited and transformed into a fetish. A high point in this development is found in the famous verses from the “Book of Suleika” in the West-östlicher Divan: “Supreme happiness of earth’s children / may be only the personality” says the beloved.5 She equates the selfhood one should not be “missing,” the demand “to continue as one is,” with manliness and with the beloved. But Goethe doesn’t stop there. Hatem responds to her that he found this supreme happiness not in the personality, but in his beloved Suleika. Her name blesses him more than the abstract identity principle of personality. Goethe reaffirms his epoch’s ideal of personality, for which his own life largely served as the model, in order to take it back again in remembrance of suppressed nature.
The criterion of personality in general is power and might: rule over people, whether possessing it in virtue of position or gaining it perhaps because of an especial lust for power, through one’s behavior and one’s so-called presence. The catchword “personality” tacitly implies a strong person, but strength understood as the ability to make others tractable should not at all be confused with the quality of a person. Because it is insinuated that strength is something ethical, language use and collective consciousness capitulate to the bourgeois religion of success. At the same time the illusion is maintained that this quality, by being part of a person’s pure essence, is still the moral quality that Kant’s doctrine aimed at. This transition is already intimated in the concept of character, the securely integrated unity of an individual in itself, that has a great and not completely unambiguous function in Kant’s ethics. Those who are glorified as personalities do not have to be important, rich in themselves, refined, productive, especially clever, or truly good. Those who are really something often lack the relationship to the domination of people that the concept of personality connotes. Often strong personalities are just those who know how to take a hint; they are people with elbows who appropriate everything they possibly can, brutally and manipulatively. In the ideal of personality nineteenth-century society praises its own false principle: a “real” person is someone who is society’s equal, internally organized according to the same law that holds society together at its very core.
This ideal of personality, in its traditional, high-liberal form, has become obsolete, and the idiosyncrasy against using the word has become somewhat socialized; certainly it occurs much less frequently now than it did in speeches around 1910. Such genuine personalities are called to mind only by gentlemen of the approved type, who are attractive, with chiseled features, and are observed in the halls of grand hotels. It’s hard to say whether they belong to the company board of directors or the hotel reception staff. Those among them who have any real practical power are anyway happily fused with their own publicity*. They travel as advertisements for themselves or their companies in harmony with the economic development that integrates the formerly separate spheres of production, circulation, and what nowadays is called propaganda and reduces them to their common denominator. From all others besides those who are more cut-out patterns of personalities than what personality used to mean, and from film and photo idols, personality is not even required anymore, is virtually an interference. In Anglo-Saxon countries if it is said of someone that he is quite a character*, then nothing friendly is intended. He is not cut smooth enough, is an old bird, a bizarre relic. Those who resist the omnipresent mechanisms of conformity are no longer considered to be the more capable persons. Because they do not fully accomplish their self-preservation through conformity, they are looked at askance: as deformed, crippled, weaklings.
Under the present conditions it has become nearly impossible to expect anyone to become a personality in the sense meant by the older ideology of education. A demand of that kind was always impudent when levied at a cleaning woman. The social space that allowed the development of a personality even in the questionable sense of its autocratic sovereignty no longer exists, probably not even at the commanding heights of business and administration. Vengeance is exacted upon the concept of personality for its having leveled the idea of a person’s humanity to his being particularly so and not otherwise. Personality is now only a mask of itself. Beckett exemplified this in the figure of Hamm in Endgame: personality as clown.
Consequently, the critique of the ideal of personality gradually extends much like the ideal itself did earlier. Thus the iron rations of pedagogical theories wanting to be up-to-date include dismissing the Humboldtian cultural goal of a rounded, developed, and educated person, precisely the personality. The impossibility of realizing this goal—if in fact it ever was supposed to have been realized—imperceptibly becomes a norm. What cannot be also should not be. The aversion to the hollow pathos of personality serves, in the name of a supposedly ideology-free understanding of reality, to justify the universal conformity, as though it is not already triumphing everywhere without any need for justification. But Humboldt’s concept of personality was by no means simply the cult of the individual, who like a plant must be watered in order to flourish. Thus in holding fast to the Kantian idea “of the humanity in our person,”6 at least he did not deny what his contemporaries Goethe and Hegel considered central to the doctrine of the individual. For all these thinkers the subject does not come to itself through the narcissistically self-related cultivation of its being-for-itself but rather through externalization, by devotedly abandoning itself to what is not itself. In the fragment, “Theory of the Self-Cultivation of Man,” Humboldt writes: “Merely because both his thought and his action are possible only by virtue of a third thing, only by virtue of the representation and elaboration of something, of which the authentic distinguishing trait is that it is not-man, i.e., is world, man tries to grasp as much world as possible and to join it with himself as closely as he can.”7 It was possible to force this great and humane writer into the role of pedagogical whipping boy only by forgetting his sophisticated theory.
In view of the spiteful gesture of “if something is falling, then give it a shove”8 that greets the concept of personality nowadays and that potentially awaits every concept not surrendering itself body and soul to society’s demand for specialized personnel, the waning notion of personality and its imago finds reconciliation in a reflected shimmer.9 There is reason to suspect that what should no longer exist, because it did not evolve and supposedly cannot exist, conceals within itself the potential of something better. Devaluating personality by considering it obsolete promotes psychological regression. The hindered formation of the ego, which more and more clearly represents the tendency of the fully forming society, is deemed a higher value, something worth promoting.10 What is sacrificed is the moment of autonomy, freedom, and resistance that once, no matter how adulterated by ideology, resonated in the ideal of personality. The concept of personality cannot be saved. In the age of its liquidation, however, something in it should be preserved: the strength of the individual not to entrust himself to what blindly sweeps down upon him, likewise not to blindly make himself resemble it. Yet what is to be preserved should not be understood as some reserve of unformed nature in the midst of a society that has been thoroughly permeated with the structures of social order. Precisely society’s excessive pressure brings forth unformed nature ever anew. The force of the ‘I’, which formerly was contained in the ideal of personality and was caricatured into autocratism and now threatens to vanish, is the force of consciousness, of rationality. It is essentially responsible for reality-testing. Within the individual it represents reality, the ‘not-I’, just as well as it represents the individual himself. Only if the individual incorporates objectivity within himself and in a certain sense, namely consciously, adjusts to it, can he develop the resistance to it. The organ of what was once unashamedly called personality has become critical consciousness. It permeates even that selfhood that had become congealed and rigidified in the concept of personality.
At least something negative can be said about the concept of the real person. He would be neither a mere function of a whole, which is inflicted upon him so thoroughly that he cannot distinguish himself from it anymore, nor would he simply retrench himself in his pure selfhood:11 precisely that is the form of a bad rootedness in nature that even now still lives on. Were he a real person, then he would no longer be a personality but also not less than one, no mere bundle of reflexes, but rather a third entity. It flashes up in Hölderlin’s vision of the poet: “Therefore, go thus unarmed / forward into life, and fear nothing!”12